Monday, 29 July 2013

Like a lot of people, specifically a lot of men, more specifically a lot of men of my generation, I never ever speak about my feelings and very rarely admit to having them. That's nothing to be proud of - it's just a particular brand of fucked up that gets handed out a lot. And in the tradition of making a virtue out of necessity I and many in the same boat, play up to it.

I'm asked a lot if it was difficult to write this or that scene, particularly the more dark and violent moments in Jorg's tale. Whilst I've answered honestly that the violence and general wickedness hasn't been particularly hard to write, I have perhaps been disingenuous in passing off other elements with similarly flip remarks.

The fact is that you can't (or at least I can't) put on paper a scene that has the potential to truly move a reader unless it moves you too. I guess there may be masters of emotional manipulation who can write in cold blood something that reduces the reader to tears. I'm not one of them. Being emotionally wedded to your writing isn't guaranteed to make others take those same emotions from it - a degree of writing skill is required in the mix too. But it is likely in general, and a certainty in my work, that a high degree of involvement is needed in order for there to be any chance that the impact will be felt on the reader's side of the page.

In short, though I will deny it to your face with my last breath, I've wiped away more that one tear whilst writing the parts that others have wiped tears away whilst reading. There. Take my man cards. Begone!

Seeing the first dozen or so reviews come in for Emperor of Thorns, and for trilogy as a whole, it's been clear that the books have had an impact on not a few of the readers. Some have just enjoyed the story. One spoke of never being truly connected to Jorg and seeing him as insane - though still giving the last book 4.5 out of 5*. It's good to know that the trilogy can be read as an exciting adventure story and that considerable enjoyment can be taken out of it even without ever really taking Jorg seriously as a human being or caring over much about the observations on his particular brand of the human condition. However, it's far more heartening to read the reviews where the reader has truly got what the books are really about and been on an emotional journey through them. For those people I sense that the tale told won't be one that is washed out by the next book or by the passage of a few months. You get the feeling reading some of these reviews that Jorg and his story will be part of their authors' internal landscape for a long time.

It's for those readers, who fully appreciated the honesty of the books, and responded to the depth of feeling I put into them, that I carry the honesty a step further and say that there were no smoke and mirrors at work here, that this writing meant a lot to me, that I laughed and cried too, and that it was a privilege to have had this chance to share those moments with them.

Monday, 22 July 2013

(note - this contest has concluded - Hilary's entry won - very many thanks to all entrants, your efforts were very much appreciated).

A book toppling contest to celebrate the release of Emperor of Thorns, last book in the Broken Empire trilogy.The prize!

#1 A signed doodled hardback copy of Emperor of Thorns (not this one, but possibly even better... or worse)

#2 A mug - sporting all three covers of the Broken Empire Trilogy

#3

The sheer honor of it. Victory over your enemies. The lamentation of their lamentors. The knowledge that your name will be whispered down the centuries.

The GLORY!

The Rules:

It's pretty simple. Set some books up and film them while you topple them. Send me the file or link to youtube etc.

There will be a day of voting August 12th and the winner will be declared. Obviously the number of books toppled will be a factor, but people will be driven by other factors such as creativity, style, filmography, and sunspots. I will order the entries by number of books involved.

Tuesday, 16 July 2013

Writing is one of those things that you don't know how you do. Or at least I don't.

The cliche is that it's like riding a bike. A skill that you can't demonstrate until you do it, and that after an absence you may start to lack faith in your ability to do again... except that when you try you always find you can. Woohoo! Look at me, Ma! I'm riding! I'M RIDING!

The trouble is that if you're struck by a sudden crisis of confidence in your cycling ability... if you know that you once could ride a bike but you're not sure how exactly you did it and now think that maybe you no longer can... just pop outside and give it a try. Pick a quiet street. No one will see you. And bingo, ten minutes later your faith in the ability of conservation of angular momentum to keep you off the concrete is restored.

Writing is like riding a bike, except that you do it with a ton of people staring at you (if they're not interested you're doing it wrong). Also the gap between peddling and finding out if you're moving forward or toppling sideways is about a year for a published author. Additionally, if you fall off... you die. Or at least that's likely the end of your career.

Pat Rothfuss recently said that one of the great things (from a writer's point of view) about short stories was that they allow you to fail. You can experiment in a short story and if it doesn't work you've only lost the days it took to write rather than the year a book might take. Moreover (and this is my addition) because the readership for short fiction is so much smaller than that for novels and the readers' investment in time is also less, you've not lost/alienated your audience (or at least not much of it).

FIAL FAIL

The one-novel-a-year model is of course far less forgiving. Produce a book that isn't excellent - that doesn't have readers raving about it... just one such book, and it's likely to be the beginning of the end. Produce a book that's an actual stinker and it's game over, man. Best take off and nuke the planet from orbit just to be sure.

So, since we're talking about the riding of bikes &/or the writing of books. Both things that we don't really know how we do. Let's look at the mechanics.

You'll notice that there are rather few books on how to ride bicycles. Chapter 1, Keep turning those pedals. Chapter 2, What to do if you start falling to one side. Chapter 3 yadda yadda.

There are however many books on how to write. These offer some comfort in the scary business of 'putting it out there', but may ultimately be of as little use.

Here are my thoughts on 'not falling off'.

Compared to a lot of research scientists I’m neither
methodical nor thorough. The kind of abstract mathematics I look at to solve
problems, the coding of it into algorithms, and the interactive development
against data do not typically tend to invite intuition. However I do seem to have built a
reputation for feeling my way to solutions and then inventing the proof after
the fact.

With writing I seem to sit at the same slightly maverick
/ under-serious end of the spectrum.

I once went to creative writing lessons. I took an
evening class, once a week for thirteen weeks, held in a port-a-cabin in the
car park of a local college. It proved very useful in making me think about the act and art of writing, and more importantly the reader.

I once read a book on writing. It was called ‘On
Writing’ and I enjoyed it a lot – mostly because Stephen King told a lot of anecdotes
in it and didn’t say much on writing.

I see a lot of writers blogging about writing. Some
of them have almost made a second career of it. And the thing here is that in
order to have much to say about writing (unless you’re going down the
autobiography / anecdote route that King took) you really have to be in what I
call the ‘mechanical school’. This doesn’t mean that your writing will be in
any way mechanical, simply that you deconstruct the writing process into many
parts and for each part draw up rules / methods / exercises and the like.

A lot of new writers are drawn to these approaches
because they give you something to hang onto. Writing can be a scary prospect
for someone taking up the pen for the first time. Having a set of instructions
can be very comforting.

Three often seen pillars of writing advice are:

i)Write every day. Set yourself word-count
targets.

ii)Plan out your story. Keep notes on the
characters. Plot a path.

iii)Your first draft will be shit. Revise,
revise, REVISE!

These are perfectly good pieces of advice. I’m not
going to argue with them. I will simply point out that writing is not a science
and that everyone’s experience with it is different.

My own experience is:

i)I don’t write every day, or even every
week. I don’t keep track on my word-count.

ii)I don’t plan my story. I just start
typing and see where I get to. Generally I don’t know what the next page will
bring, let alone the next chapter.

iii)My first draft may or may not be shit,
but it’s the only one I write. Much later I check for typos, change the odd
adjective, and send it off. I’ve tried revising work before and it feels like
chasing my tail. I’m unable to tell if version 2 or 3 is better than version 1.
So I don’t bother.

My approach may seem unprofessional (it is) and
sloppy (it is) and before I was published I was told quite regularly that I was
‘doing it wrong’. But here’s the thing: there is no ‘doing it right’. The stuff
I write means something to me – there’s heart and passion behind it – and the emotion clearly reaches a good number of the people who read it. There’s no right and
wrong. The advice you see is worth trying, but if it doesn’t fit... drop it on
the floor. The only test of whether your way is working or not is whether your
readers want to read more.

I also see a lot in writing circles about:

The importance of networking.

The art of pitching.

The magical secrets of the query letter.

How to work a book convention.

Snagging an agent.

I’m sure that all of these things can help you and
may reward study. However – they are not laws – they are not the only way.

I wrote my story. I sent it off at random to a small
number of agents I’d never heard of and whose details I got from a list on the
internet. I hadn’t ever been to a convention. I cobbled together a cover letter
at the point of writing the ‘dear agent’ email.

I post this simply to register the fact that there
are no rules. You can succeed (or fail) howsoever you choose. There's no game being played against you here, no in-crowd you need to be in with, no secret handshake, no formula.

Someone once asked me for 5 writing tips. I gave
them:

5 things I did
writing-wise that may or may not be of interest.

i)--
don't write because of something you want to be or some place you want to get.
Write because right now, this moment, you need to. ...For the minutes or hours
you're writing, the thing in front of you should be the most important piece of
fiction you've ever written.

ii)-
be honest, call upon yourself, write as if you're the only one who will ever
read this - risk ridicule and misunderstanding.

iii)
join a critique group and develop skin thick enough to take the sting from
contrary opinions whilst being sufficiently thin to admit any persistent lesson.

iv)-
consider your work on both the grand and small scale. Story is important, plot
and character are important, but so is each line. There's a power in the
language that can be exploited in almost every sentence to propel a reader on.

v)--
if your writing doesn't move you, it won't move anyone. It's incredibly
difficult to push strong emotion through into another human's head simply by
the ordered depression of plastic letter keys. If, added to this difficulty,
what you're writing isn't even important to you ... well, let's just say it
won't end well!

Sunday, 7 July 2013

It is perhaps a cliche to say how good all the entries were and how much I appreciate all the skill and effort put into these. It's also true.The competition was so fierce that some really excellent work didn't even make the top 4. I hope you all had as much fun with it as I did.Many thanks!The random prize winner was #361st Place: Nadine K. (225 points)

Monday, 1 July 2013

The recent spectacular portrait of Jorg by Kimberly Kincaid (very sadly recently deceased, far too soon) has prompted me to this blog wherein I display it and other images of the Broken Empire's most infamous son while asking whether we want our heroes (& anti-heroes & others) revealed.

My question concerns the ubiquitous hooded man of fantasy-cover-land.

When reading a book does it upset you to have the face of the main protagonist eyeing you from the cover? Keep in mind that the face on the cover might not be the same as the one the text paints for you. Do you want to see Aragorn, or Gemmell's Druss the Legend, or Hobb's assassin Fitz, looking out at you. Or when it comes down to it is the oft-maligned hood a blessing, allowing your imagination free rein to paint its own picture on the shadows beneath?